Weapons for the Snowblind, Pt. 2

Share.

Another blood-stained weapon of death? OH YEAH. Plus movies.

By Douglass C. Perry

Crystal Dynamics' Project: Snowblind looks like one hell of a game. The first-person shooter, due in February 2005, was originally referred to as Deus Ex: Clan Wars but long ago it lost the connection to its source material.

Snowblind chronicles the exploits of a soldier named Nathan Frost who gets injured and finds himself augmented with $500 million of advanced electronics. He is now a government owned super soldier commanded to use his newfound capabilities to battle a malicious general that seeks to sort weak humans from the strong by unleashing the "Snowblind," an EMP weapon capable of permanently rendering all electrical systems on a citywide scale completely useless. Even though Nathan is a one man army, he doesn't always fight alone.

Comparable to Call of Duty, Snowblind offers up a truly epic sense of war. Often times the game pits dozens of friendly units against dozens of enemy units. The player's comrades aren't governed by truly advanced artificial intelligence, nor can they be directly controlled, but they do serve to expand upon the heated feel of the title by simply serving as cool interactive d¿cor.

Likewise, the levels themselves are often cluttered with an impressive amount of interactive objects, not just including the usual assortment of boxes and crates and exploding barrels, but also randomly popping junk, turrets, cameras, robots, security systems, and partially destructible walls and pillars that emulate the effect of movie squibs. Snowblind seems to have retained the more approachable philosophy its distant ancestor, the original Deus Ex, was so famous for.

In this weapon-based feature set, we'll deliver a hefty list of weapons in video form for your viewing pleasure, including hard details on the weapon's ammo capacity, primary and secondary fire, its range of fire, and what situations and/or enemies it might be best against. Today's weapon? The EMBeam -- FCST United, BEM-7 "Herf."

Briefing: A short range Electro Magnetic Beam weapon effective against electronics and human targets. Uses BioSyn Sensor to distinguish enemies. The beam is short range but will arc between active targets increasing its range and damage. The secondary fire combines the beams into a coalescent sphere that adheres to surfaces and actively attacks targets.